Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes, Diederik P Kingma, Max Welling, 2013International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2014, Workshop Track)DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1312.6114 - The seminal paper that introduced the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and the reparameterization trick, laying the probabilistic foundation for generative modeling with autoencoders.
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - A comprehensive textbook with a dedicated chapter on Variational Autoencoders, explaining their theoretical underpinnings, architecture, and applications in detail.